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Infographic: A History of Mobile Productivity

Posted on August 8, 2011 by David

From the pager to the iPad, mobile devices have been enhancing our mobile productivity in one way or another for decades. In their early days, mobile devices were largely business-focused. Since then, they have become sleeker, more powerful, and even more appealing to consumers and business users alike. On today’s mobile devices, you can run your business or play Angry Birds – or both!

Read through the infographic below and take a walk through a history of mobile productivity. Discover the first portable handset. Learn how the groundwork for today’s app stores was laid in the 1990s. Reminisce over the earliest smartphones and tablets. Then, share with us where you think mobile productivity is headed next!

My first handheld was an HP 95LX. It came out of HP’s calculator product line, but had a calendar and contact list, as well as all the financial calculator properties of a 17B or 19B Business calculator. I loved that machine. It could not sync with anything, network with anything, or backup to anything. It finally stopped working in 2003.

Anonymous

So basically in 2010 Nokia and Symbian had 0% of the market share?

Anonymous

Sorry but this diagram is really quite incomplete in two respects.

Mobile Productivity should really mention the car phone, which has been available since 1946 in the form of “MTS” and although very restricted and operator controlled it was still used for mobile communication and productivity.

In a second and really fundamental omission there is nearly no mention of Windows Mobile/CE. The innovations of Windows on mobile productivity have been massive and many of the most fundamental things we take for granted were really only first able to shine on Windows phones. Hey, I’m no fan of Windows/Microsoft but credit where it is due!

Windows CE was released in 1996 and has spawned Windows PocketPC and Windows Mobile. The chart makes no mention of the HP/Compaq iPaq/Jornada which was very popular and had numerous incarnations. Personally I have owned two Windows smart phones including a Motorola MPx220: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MPx200

I know we live in an age with a short memory, but don’t neglect someone who briefly had such a significant market share!

http://www.companionlink.com David Z

You make some good points. However, I assure you we weren’t trying to neglect anything here. Our aim was to provide an overview of the history of mobile productivity. There are hundreds of possible devices and facts to include, but for the sake of keeping it at a reasonable length, we had to pick and choose. As such, some phones and facts didn’t end up fitting in the graphic.

All that said, thank you for sharing this extra info with everyone!

http://twitter.com/tjdimacali TJ Dimacali

Way cool!

In the Philippines, circa 2003, I remember attempting to surf the Internet using a Handspring Visor + Visorphone module. No wireless telco had ISP capability yet at the time, so I would need to make a regular GSM phone call (~P10 per minute) to a third-party dial-up ISP (~P100 per hour).